As a conservative I have often wondered, what exactly is on the other side of the aisle. I often feel silly, almost childish that if I look hard enough, my deepest fears might just crystallize. That maybe a Stalin or Lenin might be looking back at me with their evil little eyes. I know this is not the truth, but I still can not help but wonder. I also wonder what they, those on the left, fear they might see on the other side; do they fear they might see Hitler or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei starring back at them.
It seems that even with education and an ardent digestion of philosophical literature and current events we still sometimes fear the worst, even though we should know better. Maybe the closer we look at those evil monsters, the more we realize that they were just shadows of gossip and speculation and that were not that different after all. We all get frustrated with the other side, but we both become frustrated with our own side as well at times.
In reality we are very similar when taken the time to pull our head up and scan around the globe and though-out history. Even the polar opposites, the Hitlers and the Stalins, at times look the same. Their political ideologies were complete opposite, but in the end had many similar results. The radicals are what they are, radicals; and all of us, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are what is left in the middle, the guardians of what Locke, Rousseau, and Smith referred to as classical liberalism, social contracts, and free markets, the pillars of American political ideology.
This student would like to believe, that even with our internal differences, our eternal similarities will stand.
Dominic Cole
York College of Pennsylvania
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